How Not To Do It Volume 1

Before the kitchens, before the chaos, before the addictions and reinventions, there was a kid trying to survive a life that never stopped shifting under his feet. How Not To Do It: Volume 1 is the first installment in Don Walker’s brutally honest, darkly funny, and deeply human memoir trilogy — a story written over five years, one hard chapter at a time.

Walker grew up in the rural Midwest, surrounded by fractured family dynamics, mental illness, and the early sparks of the addictive patterns that would follow him into adulthood. What begins as a portrait of a boy navigating instability slowly becomes the origin story of a chef who would spend decades running from himself — through kitchens, states, relationships, and disasters both self‑inflicted and inherited.

Told with unfiltered candor and a voice that speaks directly to the reader, this memoir breaks the emotional “fourth wall,” inviting you into the author’s internal world as he revisits the moments that shaped him. Walker doesn’t glamorize the past or hide from it. Instead, he examines it with the clarity that only comes from survival and sobriety.